Gorgeous Garden at a Historic Home

An overgrown Tudor home and garden is magnificently restored

Slide 1 Of Gorgeous Garden at a Historic Home

Matthew Benson

When it came on the market in the 1980s, Old Mill Farm looked like the setting for Sleeping Beauty’s castle: A forest preserve had virtually swallowed the acreage and the once magnificent Tudor home in Lake Forest, Illinois.

Frank Mariani, who played on the fields of the estate as a boy, saw past volunteer trees poking through the home’s massive double-hung windows. As owner of Mariani Landscape, he envisioned how to incorporate what remained—interesting tree selections and a few ornamentals—into the spectacular grounds of today.

He and wife Sherri bought the 1929 home and its contents in 1986, a few years after the death of its original owner, George Rasmussen, a Danish immigrant and member of the family that started the National Tea grocery chain. Sherri, a yoga teacher whose studio is on this pesticide-free property, loves the vegetable garden, where she can pick dinner and serve it on a silver platter “that always makes me smile.” A remnant from the days when the place was a prizewinning dairy farm, the platter is engraved “Bessie, 1937.”

After the Marianis moved in, Sherri was thrilled to find plans by acclaimed landscape architect Jens Jensen rolled up in the attic. (See page 115 for more on Jensen.) She had them framed as a surprise for Frank, who kept the woodland garden Jensen had designed, nursing 90-year-old lilacs along and continuing Jensen’s use of native plants, including bluestem grass in the prairie area. “Mother Nature does a pretty nice job,” Frank notes. He uses the grounds to test plants for his family’s landscaping business. The eldest of five sons, he went from high school to running the firm while attending college at night after his father died. Now, son Frank Jr. works there as well.

Coming upon the property at the end of a street of big suburban homes with manicured lawns, sidewalks, and buried power lines is like stepping back in time, Frank says. “All of a sudden you see nothing but forest preserve, and after 1,500 feet, our property, with telephone poles with wires and a ditch instead of storm sewers.”

The driveway is edged in a carpet of hellebores and ferns instead of the usual North Shore hostas, with a gate that keeps deer from making the grounds a buffet. From the front of the home, you see smooth turf with peeks of yew hedges enclosing perennial gardens and a Belgian fence with espaliered trees around an orchard. These glimpses give the garden an air of mystery. Further discoveries include a pool area along with a berry patch and shade and butterfly gardens. Among unexpected touches are shaped boxwoods—which can only be achieved with time—that draw oohs and aahs in the vegetable garden.

Frank doesn’t want people to enjoy all this only from afar or from inside the house. “I want it to be so beautiful that people can’t wait to get their hand on the doorknob and go outside.”

Sherri loves the indoor-outdoor flow; whether it’s crocuses peeping through the snow in winter or sumac flaming in the fall, the grounds are on view throughout the house. Proud of their garden’s heritage and deeply committed to its future, the Marianis love the idea of making it gorgeous for generations to come.

These pinky/orangey nasturtiums contribute to the garden’s palette of mainly pink, yellow, purple and orange, although it also has plenty of green. “Green is a color!” homeowner Frank Mariani points out.

Arches, obelisks, and the varying heights and textures of a rustic cedar fence add interest to the potager, where boxwood trimmed into an X shape establishes the bones of the garden. The potager provides herbs, vegetables, and flowers for cutting. The Marianis love cooking with just-picked veggies and entertaining outdoors. Says Frank, “I like to set a table under the pergola with a little music, a little wine, and food from the garden.”

The acclaimed and charismatic Danish-American landscape architect Jens Jensen (1860–1951) was known for his city park projects in Chicago (he created Columbus Park on the city’s western edge), for his work with architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, and for privately landscaped estates for clients such as Edsel Ford.

Here you see the plan for the contemporary garden and the original plan by Jens Jensen side by side.

The Marianis have followed Jensen’s technique of using plants native to the areas he landscaped. Early in his career with the Chicago Parks Commission, Jensen planted a formal garden of exotic flowers. When they did not do well, he dug up wildflowers in the countryside and transplanted them into a small corner of Union Park. That was the beginning of his practice of using plants native to the landscapes he designed. It became a hallmark of his work. Jensen once wrote, It was the Plains that I had learned to love in my adopted country…the hawthorns with their out spread branches—over the Plains themselves … it was like they stretched out their arms to greet you."

During Jensen’s era, people in Chicago were proud of their skyscrapers and elevated trains, but conservationists and social reformers like Jensen worried that the native landscape was disappearing. The film’s director, Carey Lundin, says of his work in the parks of Chicago, “Jensen’s work represents activism and art coming together. During his time, there were no playgrounds. During the day parks were crowded. They were the only places people could go to escape factory life. Instead of giant boulevards and big statues, Jensen brought to public spaces a Midwestern regional look. People got to see flowers they hadn’t seen in a long time, and they welcomed them like old friends.”

Jensen designed this waterfall for Columbus Park, seven miles from Chicago’s downtown, an oasis of wildflowers, stepping stone paths, and a river. Many visitors think it is a natural site, but it was landscaped by Jensen.

Jensen was hired by Henry Ford to create tree and flower-lined meadows at Fair Lane, his Dearborn, Michigan, estate. The two eventually fell out over artistic differences, but Edsel Ford, automotive designer and son of Henry Ford, admired his work and commissioned him to design four residential landscapes for his family. This one is on Lake St. Clair. Shown in the present day, it retains the Jensen spirit.

Ford’s Cove was one of Edsel Ford’s favorite parts of the property. An avid boatman, he sometimes took his boat to work at the Rouge Factory Plant rather than drive. Jensen created a peninsula, originally as an island called Bird Island, to attract migratory birds. The peninsula created the cove.